Hi everyone,
Matt here, I’ve just spoke to Kat, who is the finance systems manager here at Envato. As promised, I want to jump in to give a little bit more information on the sales reversals that occurred yesterday.
We did indeed process a backlog of sales reversals yesterday, effecting a number of authors. As quite a few authors have already noted, sales reversals are always a result of payment processors reversing transactions that have previously been cleared. They are not Envato implementing a refund on behalf of a customer, or about Envato trying to gain from authors. Sales reversals can be for a number of reasons, but at the end of the day they are not created by us. Sales Reversals are initiated by a bank or payment processor (paypal, skrill, mastercard and so on) and we (Envato’s finance team) have to adhere to them.
We’re sorry for the pain and confusion around this. What has happened here is a one-off event in which, due to a system issue, these particular sales reversals have occurred as a batch. Because we like to ensure our authors are kept up to date with what they’re earning, our standard (and preferred) way of working is to reverse the sale transaction as soon as possible, usually within a few weeks of the payment. Unfortunately, the way these payment gateways work is that a sale can be reversed up to six months after transaction. This is very rare, but it can happen.
We’ve have an amazing team of people here at Envato dedicated to securing our platforms and preventing this kind of activity, but unfortunately there is no way to completely prevent sales reversals. I hope this answers some of your questions.
PS- Because there have been a number of threads created in relation to this, I’m closing off this thread and creating a new thread in Envato announcements so we can centralise the discussion and reply as required. Please continue the discussion there